I always thought I would lose my best girlfriends to motherhood. To mum WhatsApp groups and playdates – and not being able to get a drink after 7pm because their child is teething. But actually, I’ve lost them to something far worse.
They’ve all buggered off abroad.
The news of my collective best friend’s departure couldn’t have come at a worse time. I’d just come out of an intense long-distance situationship. I was already wallowing in a sea of self-pity when a bessie announced she was moving to India for most of the year. Another had already relocated to the United Arab Emirates post-Covid, and I was only just getting used to pretending Abu Dhabi was “not that far”.
Then the final one moved to Bath, which I know is not technically abroad, but from where I’m standing in South London, it may as well be Magaluf.
It happened one after another, like they were all handing in their resignation letters to our social life.
My circle of friends had completely defied the odds until then. We genuinely felt like we’d hit the jackpot: women well into our mid-to-late thirties who had all, very deliberately, lived within walking distance of each other. We still went out, went raving, went to festivals and made bad decisions after what was always supposed to be “a chilled BBQ”. We were young at heart – and avoided the typical 30-something move of marriage, kids and moving to the suburbs.
Being child-free and single means you have the luxury of time. Some business leaders bang on about us all having the same 24 hours in a day, but when you don’t have kids and there’s no partner asking what’s for dinner, those 24 hours can morph into 36. Which is wonderful when your friends are nearby, but can start to feel strangely empty when your nearest and dearest are no longer a hop, skip and a jump away.
I have freedom. Flexibility. I can do whatever I want, whenever I want. I can clear my diary for something last minute, go for a drink on a Tuesday, disappear into a club and emerge 12 hours later dehydrated but satiated, rot in bed all Sunday, eat breakfast for dinner and nobody can say a thing. The world is supposedly my oyster.
And yet here I am at 40, standing in the middle of all this freedom, looking around thinking: where is everyone?
I know how fortunate I’ve been to hold on to my closest friendships for as long as I have. But maybe this is what friendship in your 40s is: realising people don’t just leave because they have children. They leave because life pulls everyone into different versions of adulthood. I always assumed the end of this era would involve strollers, nappies, birthday parties and bi-monthly (if I am lucky) nights out organised six weeks in advance via a poll. I just didn’t expect “everyone emigrating” to be on my bingo card.
But when I spoke to each of my friends about why they were leaving, it revealed something much bigger than simple lifestyle changes or people “growing up”. It revealed something about Britain itself.
One friend spoke about the exhaustion of constantly having to prove herself at work as a South Asian woman and how the political climate in recent years – the race riots, the anti-immigration rhetoric, politicians endlessly stoking culture wars for clicks and votes – had slowly chipped away at her. London no longer felt like the city she fell in love with – a sentiment I share.
Another friend left because the maths of London had stopped making sense – a full-time job, rising mortgage rates and feeling like a decent quality of life was permanently out of reach. What struck me was that both of my friends, one British Indian, the other half-Arab, said something similar after moving abroad: for the first time in their lives, they no longer felt like they were fighting to belong. No code-switching, no softening themselves, no feeling slightly outside the room. Britain had simply exhausted them.
And the final friend, the Bath exile, had simply had enough of London itself. The noise, the pace, the grind of it all. She wanted green space, calmer mornings and a life that didn’t involve spending £15.95 on a small plate of croquettes in Peckham while pretending it was normal.
It feels like there’s been a genuine shift. My mates aren’t just “down the road” anymore. There are no more, “Oi Wys? I’m outside your flat” voice notes. No more accidental 36-hour Thursdays. Everything now requires scheduling.
And in a strange way, it does feel like I’m starting over. Building my community again from scratch. I’m saying yes more. Talking to random people on nights out. Making brilliant new friends who remind me of my girls when we were younger and slightly more feral.
I’ve come to the realisation that I’ve not lost people entirely, but I’ve lost proximity to them. Friendship can survive distance, but spontaneity often can’t.
And I know us. We’ll find our way back to each other eventually. In 40 years’ time we’ll probably be in the same care home together, absolutely terrorising the staff, reminiscing about our 15 years in South London when we painted the town red, survived heartbreaks, pandemics, comedowns and hangovers, and somehow still always made it to the next “chilled BBQ”.